What's the matter bucko, tired
of
those flying saucer people pestering you every day with their tales of
woe and Armageddon? Are you scared of the government and their
corporate cronies looking
for new ways to spy on you and take away your personal rights and
freedoms? Are you sick to death of those pesky Men-In-Black harassing
you because of those unwanted contacts with those flying saucer folks
and government agents?

Well cheer up, because once again, like a bolt of awareness and
enlightenment from the sky, Conspiracy Journal is here to uncover all
those dirty little secrets that THEY are trying to hide! So sit back
and
relax and enjoy another thought-provoking issue of the number one
e-mail newsletter of conspiracies, UFOs the paranormal and much, much
more.

All these exciting stories and MORE
in this week's issue of CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!
~ And Now, On With The Show! ~

AS HEARD ON COAST TO COAST

Revealing The Bizarre Powers Of Harry Houdini

Psychic? Medium? Prophet? Clairvoyant? Was
Houdini's Fanatical Debunking of Psychics and Mediums A Subterfuge to
Conceal His Own Remarkable Paranormal Abilities?

At his burial some curious and suggestive words were used by the
presiding rabbi: "HOUDINI POSSESSED A
WONDROUS POWER THAT HE NEVER UNDERSTOOD AND WHICH HE NEVER REVEALED TO
ANYONE IN LIFE!

The creator of Sherlock Holes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Harry
Houdini were strange bedfellows. Doyle was a contemporary of the
world's greatest magician and escape artist, who continually battled
his friend over the legitimacy of life after death, and the reality of
spiritualism. Doyle was a "true believer," while Houdini made it his
"mission" to denounce just about all things preternatural.

Doyle was convinced - from what he personally witnessed and what others
confided to him - that Houdini could read minds, dematerialize,
possessed supernatural strength, and was guided by angelic forces which
shielded him from harm even during the most dangerous of escape
performances which likely would have caused death to others.

Doyle stated that Houdini had once remarked, "There are some of my
feats which my own wife does not know the secret of." And a famous
Chinese conjurer who had seen Houdini perform added, "This is not a
trick, it is a gift." Sadly, many of Houdini's feats died with him,
even though they would have been an invaluable asset. "What can cover
all these facts," states Doyle, "save that there was some element in
his power which was peculiar to himself, that could only point to a
psychic element -- in a word, that he was a medium."

Here is both sides of the story -- in the actual words of the famed
Sherlock Holmes originator and Houdini himself, who went out of his way
to create the impression that fakes and phonies were afoot everywhere
in the "shady world" of table tapping, levitating trumpets, spirit
photography, slate writing, as well as the materialization of
ectoplasmic forms in the darkening shadows of the seance room.

ALSO, FREE WITH THIS BOOK A
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This incredible book and FREE AUDIO CD
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for info on shipping costs and how to order)

After 10 years of comparative
slumber, the sun is waking up - and it's got astronomers on full alert.

This week several US media outlets reported that NASA was warning the
massive flare that caused spectacular light shows on Earth earlier this
month was just a precursor to a massive solar storm building that had
the potential to wipe out the entire planet's power grid.

NASA has since rebutted those reports, saying it could come "100 years
away or just 100 days", but an Australian astronomer says the space
community is betting on the sooner scenario rather than the latter.

Despite its rebuttal, NASA's been watching out for this storm since
2006 and reports from the US this week claim the storms could hit on
that most Hollywood of disaster dates - 2012.

Similar storms back in 1859 and 1921 caused worldwide chaos, wiping out
telegraph wires on a massive scale.

The 2012 storm has the potential to be even more disruptive.

"The general consensus among general astronomers (and certainly solar
astronomers) is that this coming Solar maximum (2012 but possibly later
into 2013) will be the most violent in 100 years," astronomy lecturer
and columnist Dave Reneke said.

"A bold statement and one taken seriously by those it will affect most,
namely airline companies, communications companies and anyone working
with modern GPS systems.

"They can even trip circuit breakers and knock out orbiting satellites,
as has already been done this year."

Regardless, the point astronomers are making is it doesn't matter if
the next Solar Max isn't the worst in history, or even as bad as the
1859 storms.

It's the fact that there hasn't been one since the mid-80s. Commodore
had just launched the Amiga and the only digital storm making the news
was Tetris.

No one really knows what effect the 2012-2013 Solar Max will have on
today's digital-reliant society.

US government officials earlier this year took part in a "tabletop
exercise" in Boulder, Colorado, to map out what might happen if the
Earth was hit with a storm as intense as the 1859 and 1921 storms.

The 1859 storm was of a similar size to that predicted by NASA to hit
within the next three years – one of decreased activity, but more
powerful eruptions.

NASA said that a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences
found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause “$1 to 2
trillion in damages to society's high-tech infrastructure and require
four to 10 years for complete recovery”.

Staff at the Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado, which hosted
the exercise, said with our reliance on satellite technology, such an
event could hit the Earth with the magnitude of a global hurricane or
earthquake.

The reason for the concern comes as the sun enters a phase known as
Solar Cycle 24.

All the alarming news building around the event is being fuelled by two
things.

The first is a book by disaster expert Lawrence E. Joseph, Guilty of
Apocalypse: The Case Against 2012, in which he claims the "Hurricane
Katrina for the Earth" may cause unprecedented planetwide upheaval.

The second is a theory that claims sunspots travel through the sun on a
"conveyor belt" similar to the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt which controls
weather on Earth.

The belt carries magnetic fields through the sun. When they hit the
surface, they explode as sunspots.

Weakened, they then travel back through the sun's core to recharge.

It all happens on a rough 40-50-year cycle, according to solar
physicist David Hathaway of the National Space Science and Technology
Center in the US.

He says when the belt speeds up, lots of magnetic fields are collected,
which points to more intense future activity.

"The belt was turning fast in 1986-1996," Prof Hathaway said.

"Old magnetic fields swept up then should reappear as big sunspots in
2010-2011."

Most experts agree, although those who put the date of Solar Max in
2012 are getting the most press.

They claim satellites will be aged by 50 years, rendering GPS even more
useless than ever, and the blast will have the equivalent energy of 100
million hydrogen bombs.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr
Fisher told Mr Reneke in the most recent issue of Australasian Science.

“Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on
the Earth and it’s rapid, just like a lightning bolt.

AKRON, Ohio - A retired FBI
Agent from Summit County is making claims regarding the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy that go beyond conspiracy theories.

Don Adams speaks clearly and concisely when describing the events of
November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was killed, and he doesn't
waiver from his position that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill President
John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

"It is a fact," says Adams, and he says he has the FBI documents to
prove it.

At his home in Akron, Ohio, Adams is surrounded by thousands of reports
and records from the National Archives and Records Administration. His
name appears on many of the papers, but he says other reports have been
doctored, or are missing, "Everything I had done is gone. It's all
gone," Adams said.

The Army veteran joined the FBI after serving in the Korean war. He
trained in Washington, D.C., and Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned
to an FBI field office in Thomasville, Georgia.

One of Adams first assignments was investigating an extreme right
radical, with connections to the States Rights Party and KKK named
Joseph Adams Milteer. "He was reportedly one of most violent men in the
country," said Adams.

One week after completing the investigation, President Kennedy was
gunned down in Dallas.

Agent Adams located Milteer in Quintan, Georgia on November 27, 1963,
but according to Adams, the Senior Agent in charge would not allow a
proper interrogation.

"I said, 'Boss wait a minute, we have an opportunity to elicit
tremendous information from him' and he replied '5 questions and
nothing more'."

Years later, while searching the archives Adams learned that Milteer
had threatened to kill President Kennedy November 9, 1963, just weeks
before the assassination, and that FBI agents had allegedly lied about
his whereabouts immediately following threat.

In a tape recording Adams played for Fox 8 News, Milteer tells an
informant the best way to get the president, "is from an office
building with a high powered rifle."

The informant asks if they are really going to kill President Kennedy
and on the tape recording Milteer responds, "Oh yes. It's in the works."

Adams wonders why the FBI and Secret Service permitted the President to
travel to Dallas with that knowledge.

"[They] should have stopped the President from traveling instantly."
said Adams.

And an FBI record states that after the assassination, "a jubilant"
Milteer bragged to the informant, "You thought I was kidding when I
said he would be killed from a window with a high powered rifle."

Adams questions why Milteer appears in a photograph near President
Kennedy's limousine before the shooting, but was never mentioned in the
Warren Commission Report.

Adams suspects Milteer was definitely involved in President Kennedy's
death, but he says Oswald absolutely was not.

In 1964 Adams was transferred to Dallas, Texas. He watched the now
famous Zapruder film and chased leads connected to Kennedy's death.

The Warren Commission report said three bullets were fired from behind
the president, but Adams claims there were clearly 11 shots fired,
including a frontal shot that struck President Kennedy's neck.

Adams claims that he mentioned his findings to Senior FBI Agents, and
was told by one unnamed agent, "Don be careful what you say and how you
say it."

Adams says witnesses at the Book Depository saw Oswald in the break
room drinking a Coke at the exact time of the shooting.

According to Adams, even if Oswald was on the building's sixth floor,
Adams informed Senior FBI Agents that Oswald could not have possibly
fired three shots in seven-and-a-half seconds, from a bolt action rifle
so precisely while looking through a scope. Adams alleges he was again
warned to keep quiet.

"I said, 'I'm gonna tell you right now guys, no way in the world he
fire those shots' and boy I was really cautioned then." said Adams.

Adams has hundreds of other facts and papers that he says prove the
Warren Commission's report was erronious.

The 80-year-old is currently putting the papers into a book and he has
also produced a documentary style DVD, which is being sold on his
website.

Adams says he is not seeking fame and fortune, rather truth and
justice. He wants another commission established to re-investigate what
really happened in Dallas before all of the agents and witnesses are
gone.

"When we die off, no one will talk about these things." said Adams, "I
hope the truth gets told whatever it is."

Some mythical creatures have their origin in tradition and tales from
the distant past. However, each culture is associated with a multitude
of interesting and odd creatures, many of these beings are humanoids.
One of these legendary humanoids is the Ebu Gogo.

Ebu Gogo are a group of human-like creatures that appear in the
mythology of the people of the island of Flores, Indonesia. In the Nage
language of central Flores, ebu means 'grandmother' and gogo means 'he
who eats anything'.

The Ebu Gogo are described as small, nasty people with a voracious
appetite that sometimes included the devouring of the occasional human
baby. Ebu Gogo have hair covered bodies, longish arms, big bellies and
protruding ears. They were said to walk awkwardly and could be heard
murmuring in their own language and were said to be capable of
mimicking human speech. When they could tolerate the Ebu Gogo no more
the Flores islanders drove the small people in the direction of the
caves, perhaps near Liang Bau or perhaps they burned the survivors
alive. In any case, these stories were probably told to keep truculent
Flores children in line in much the same fashion as some western fairy
tales are told.

Indonesian culture just like any other has folklore about ghosts,
little people and mysterious beings. Word of mouth folktales are handed
down from generation to generation. Indonesian village people would
talk of an ape-like creature that walks like a man.

Some scientists believe that the Ebu Gogo folklore maybe a shared
cultural memory of Homo floresiensis but there is no solid evidence to
support that theory. However, legends have the Ebu Gogo disappearing
about 400 years ago at the time of the arrival of the Dutch and
Portuguese explorers. Scientists working on the Homo floresiensis find
have also referred to the Ebu Gogo as 'Hobbits'.

From October 2004 - telegraph - Richard Roberts, discoverer of the
'Hobbit', says local tales suggest the species could still exist.

When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing
tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning
grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales
contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine
there had to be a grain of truth in them.

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw,
including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even
human meat.

When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin
- the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing
up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).

The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they
tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and
ate - one of their babies.

They ran away with the baby to their cave which was at the foot of the
local volcano, some tens of metres up a cliff face. The villagers
offered them bales of dry grass as fodder, which they gratefully
accepted.

A few days later, the villagers went back with a burning bale of grass
which they tossed into the cave. Out ran the Ebu Gogo, singed but not
fried, and were last seen heading west, in the direction of Liang Bua,
where we found the Hobbit, as it happens.

When my colleague Gert van den Bergh first heard these stories a decade
ago, which several of the villages around the volcano recount with only
very minor changes in detail, he thought them no better than leprechaun
tales until we unearthed the Hobbit. (I much prefer Ebu as the name of
our find but my colleague Mike Morwood was insistent on Hobbit.)

The anatomical details in the legends are equally fascinating. They are
described as about a metre tall, with long hair, pot bellies, ears that
slightly stick out, a slightly awkward gait, and longish arms and
fingers - both confirmed by our further finds this year.

They [the Ebu Gogo] murmured at each other and could repeat words
[spoken by villagers] verbatim. For example, to 'here's some food',
they would reply 'here's some food'. They could climb slender-girthed
trees but, here's the rub, were never seen holding stone tools or
anything similar, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts in
the H. floresiensis levels at Liang Bua. That's the only inconsistency
with the Liang Bua evidence.

The women Ebu Gogo had extremely pendulous breasts, so long that they
would throw them over their shoulders, which must have been quite a
sight in full flight.

We did ask the villagers if they ever interbred with the Ebu Gogo. They
vigorously denied this, but said that the women of Labuan Baju (a
village at the far western end of Flores, better known as LBJ) had
rather long breasts, so they must have done.

Poor LBJ must be the butt of jokes in Flores, rather like the Irish and
Tasmanians.

A local eruption at Liang Bua (in western Flores) may have wiped out
local hobbits around 12,000 years ago, but they could well have
persisted much later in other parts of the island. The villagers said
that the last hobbit was seen just before the village moved location,
farther from the volcano, not long before the Dutch colonists settled
in that part of central Flores, in the 19th century.

Do the Ebu Gogo still exist? It would be a hoot to search the last
pockets of rainforest on the island. Not many such pockets exist, but
who knows. At the very least, searching again for that lava cave, or
others like it, should be done, because remains of hair only a few
hundred years old, would surely survive, snagged on the cave walls or
incorporated in deposits, and would be ideal for ancient DNA analyses.

Interestingly, we did find lumps of dirt with black hair in them this
year in the Hobbit levels, but don't know yet if they're human or
something else. We're getting DNA testing done, which we hope will be
instructive.

Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his
bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote
Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village
were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three
weeks ago.

"They said she was very little and very pretty," he says, holding his
hand at waist height. "Some people saw her very close up."

The villagers of Boawae believe the strange woman came down from a cave
on the steaming mountain where short, hairy people they call Ebu Gogo
lived long ago.

"Maybe some Ebu Gogo are still there," the 70-year-old chief told the
Herald through an interpreter in Boawae last week.

The locals' descriptions of Ebu Gogo as about a metre tall, with pot
bellies and long arms match the features of a new species of human
"hobbits" whose bones were recently unearthed by Australian and
Indonesian researchers in a different part of Flores in a cave known as
Liang Bua.

The unexpected discovery of this tiny Homo floresiensis, who existed
until at least 12,000 years ago at Liang Bua, before being apparently
wiped out by a volcanic eruption, was hailed as one of the most
important archaeological finds in decades when it was announced in
October.

The chief adds that the mysterious little woman in Boawae somehow
"escaped" her captors, and the local police said they knew nothing of
her existence when he quizzed them.

The prospect that some hobbits still exist in pockets of thick, fertile
jungle on Flores is extremely unlikely, says Douglas Hobbs, a member of
the team that discovered Homo floresiensis. But it is possible they
survived near Boawae until 300 or so years ago, when the chief's
ancestors moved into the area, he says.

The detailed stories that the villagers tell about the legendary Ebu
Gogo on the volcano have convinced the Australian and Indonesian team
to search for bones of hobbits in this cave when they return to the
rugged island next year, says Hobbs, an emeritus archaeologist with the
University of New England, who discussed excavation plans with the
chief last week.

Getting to the cave on the 2100-metre-high Ebulobo volcano, however,
will be no simple matter for the team led by Professor Mike Morwood of
UNE. The blood of a pig must first be spilt in this society where
Catholic faith is melded with animist beliefs and ancestor worship.

The sacrifice and the feast will please the ancestors and bring many
villagers together to talk about the cave, says the chief, whose
picture of his grandfather, the king, in traditional head-dress, sits
framed on the wall next to images of Jesus.

If the right rituals are followed, "then we will be able to find the
road to the hole again", he says.

A Dutch palaeontologist, Dr Gert van den Bergh, a member of the team,
was first shown the cave at a distance more than a decade ago, after
hearing folk tales of the Ebu Gogo, which means "grandmother who eats
everything".

People living around the volcano told him a consistent story of the
hairy creatures that devoured whatever they could grasp in their long
fingers. The villagers tolerated the stealing of food until the Ebu
Gogo began to snatch babies and eat them too. They then set upon the
little people, forcing them out of the cave with bales of burning grass.

Van den Bergh dismissed the tales as akin to those of leprechauns and
elves, until the hobbit bones were found.

While the search for more bones is being planned, a political furore
has broken out after a leading Indonesian palaeoanthropologist - with
no connection to the find - last week "borrowed" all the delicate
remains from six hobbits found at Liang Bua against the wishes of local
and Australian team members. Professor Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada
University, who has challenged the view that Homo floresiensis is a new
species, had previously taken the skull and bones of the most complete
specimen, a 30-year-old female hobbit, from the Indonesian Centre for
Archaeology in Jakarta, where they had been kept.

Professor Morwood said it was wrong that the team who found the remains
were unable to analyse them first. "It is not good for the Indonesian
researchers nor their institution."

However, he said Professor Jacob had signed an agreement to return all
the bones by January 1.

Ralph A. Multer’s blue-collar life collided with the extraterrestrial
in Canton many years ago.

A wounded World War II veteran who walked with a limp, Multer exhibited
a gruff exterior. He liked to spin stories about his days as a gunner’s
mate on a Navy warship, including ones about the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Multer worked on cars and rode a motorcycle. His nickname was “Bear,” a
reference to his large frame. And on occasion, he enjoyed a few
swallows of vodka.

At 22 and married, Multer worked hard to support his wife, driving a
truck for the Timken Co.

He wasn’t normally given to far-flung tales of flying saucers and
little green men. Until, that is, the summer of 1947.

Multer is said to be Canton’s connection to the most famous UFO story
in world history: The alleged crash of an alien spacecraft near
Roswell, N.M., in July 1947.

He told loved ones he hauled material from the crashed spaceship to one
of the Timken plants in Canton that summer. A Timken furnace could not
dent, damage or melt the UFO wreckage. Not even slightly.

An FBI agent made it very clear. Don’t tell anybody about the covert
operation. Keep it hush-hush.

That’s a fascinating story. A whopper. Is it true? Can it be verified?
Especially when you consider Multer died in 1982. Could a company of
Timken’s iconic stature be complicit in perhaps the greatest government
cover-up of all time?

SUMMER OF ’47

July 8, 1947. UFO historians consider that a monumental date. It is
when the Roswell Army Air Field issued a press release that a crashed
flying disk had been recovered in the New Mexico desert.

The military quickly changed its story. A second press release stated
the 509th Bomb Group at the Roswell base mistakenly had identified a
weather balloon as flying saucer wreckage.

Legions of UFO buffs believe the Roswell story. Researchers and authors
have interviewed hundreds of people on the subject, including former
military officers. Some believers have obtained once-classified
documents, connecting the dots to conclude that the government
concealed the crash and stashed away dead aliens with balloon-shaped
heads, large eyes and child-like bodies.

Others declare the Roswell story to be a ridiculous myth borne out of
wild imaginations. They contend it’s utter nonsense concocted by nuts
who are loose with the facts and heavy on speculation. They argue the
UFO crowd has yet to produce hard evidence, such as a hunk of the
damaged flying saucer.

Multer was a believer. He became one 63 years ago while working a
four-hour shift for Timken.

Multer told his wife the story. Years later, he shared it with his
daughter.

It was August or September. Multer had hoped to finish the shift and
meet his wife for lunch. But the normalcy of the day quickly faded.

Multer said he and two other drivers were asked to pick up loads at a
railroad yard. Three flatbed trucks, covered with canvas, carried the
loads.

The load on Multer’s truck was the largest. The convoy of trucks was
escorted by officials of some type. Multer had some level of security
clearance at the company.

FBI agents had met the trio of truck drivers. Multer asked about the
loads. An agent told him they were parts of a flying saucer recovered
in New Mexico. The strength and durability of the material would be
tested in a super-hot Timken furnace.

“They talked to a person later who was there that night (at one of the
Timken plants), and they said they couldn’t cut it, they couldn’t even
heat it,” said Sundi Multer-Lingle, Multer’s daughter. “The piece of
metal, well I don’t know if you can call it metal, the object was
absolutely impenetrable.”

Metallic. Lightweight. Silver or dark gray. That’s how her father
described the mysterious material.

“We grew up with the story,” said Multer-Lingle, 58, who was born in
Canton and lives in Knoxville, Tenn. “Dad would put us up on his lap,
and he would tell us the story.”

He never changed his story. Or added details, she said.

“Dad wasn’t a liar at all,” Multer-Lingle said. “I mean, if he told you
something, you believed it because that’s just how he was, and I heard
this so many times and so much that we never doubted it.”

Multer’s late wife told UFO researchers the experience left a lasting
impression on her husband. It “never left his mind from then on,” she
said in an interview in the 1990s.

RALPH AND ROSWELL

Roswell-related stories inundate the Internet. Books, movies and
television documentaries transformed the Roswell story into a pop
culture phenomenon. A museum in Roswell is dedicated to the topic. The
Roswell UFO Festival takes place each July. A website for the Roswell
newspaper features UFO-themed merchandise for sale.

Tucked away on a handful of websites, the Multer story keeps a low
profile in the world of sensational UFO accounts. Multer’s Roswell
story apparently is not mentioned in any book.

At the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, a
search through the library’s database and archives turned up nothing
about Multer and Timken as they relate to the UFO crash story, a museum
employee said.

In the mid-1990s, William E. Jones and Irena McCammon Scott uncovered
Multer’s story. That’s when Multer’s wife was interviewed. The duo
co-authored an article about Multer in the Ohio UFO Notebook in 1994 as
part of a compilation of pieces titled, “The Ohio UFO Crash Connection
and Other Stories.”

Up until then, Ralph’s story had been a well-kept family secret, said
Multer-Lingle. Outsiders weren’t privy to it. Multer’s wife, Violet M.
Brown, died in 2009; at the time of her death, she was known as Vikki
May Black.

Stricken with health problems, Ralph had died nearly 20 years earlier.

“I remember we went up to Timken (in Canton) and interviewed some
people,” said Scott, 102, the UFO researcher who helped break the
Multer story. “But I don’t remember how we got the story to start.”

MULTER’S STORY

Multer’s story is difficult to verify. According to records from the
Golden Lodge United Steelworkers Local 1123, Multer left Timken in
1952. His daughter says that is when the family moved to the Portsmouth
area in Scioto County, where Multer then worked as a railroad brakeman.

Timken spokeswoman Lorrie Paul Crum said Multer worked with the company
in the early 1950s, initially in the steel operations and later as a
truck driver. However, a search didn’t turn up all of the company
records on Multer, Crum said.

“We didn’t have his beginning employment records,” she said.

“We had partial records. We don’t keep them for all the employees.”

Multer could have worked at Timken in 1947, said Tom Sponhour, editor
of the Golden Lodge News, noting records can be sketchy that far back.

“We talked with retirees and executives familiar with all facets of ...
Timken’s long-standing relationships with government and scientific
organizations serving as one of the world’s foremost experts in
metallurgy,” Crum said.

But “no one had any recollection of Multer’s story,” she wrote in an
e-mail response.

The Repository contacted several Timken retirees who worked for the
company in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Only one recalled hearing about Multer. Dominick T. Rex got a job at
Timken in 1946 in the roller bearings plant.

“It was just a rumor about a truck driver (who) did something,” Rex
recalled. “He did something, and it was Ralph.”

But the 84-year-old does not recall anything about a crashed UFO.

Scott, one of the UFO investigators who co-authored the original story
about Multer, said she and the other researcher visited Timken in the
mid-1990s to inquire about the former truck driver and Roswell.

None of the retired management and engineer employees contacted by UFO
investigators had heard of the alleged Canton connection to Roswell,
said Scott, who worked on satellite photography in the 1960s for the
Defense Intelligence Agency. She is a former biology professor at St.
Bonaventure University.

“I don’t have a firm conclusion,” she said of the alleged UFO crash.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not respond to a phone inquiry or
e-mail from The Repository seeking comment about Roswell-related events
in 1947 and Multer’s story. The agency forwarded the call Thursday to
the U.S. Air Force.

As of Friday, the Air Force had not replied. In the mid-1990s, the Air
Force issued two in-depth reports, following an inquiry by the General
Accounting Office, in an effort to debunk the Roswell story.

UFO RESEARCHERS

Stanton T. Friedman, a well-known researcher and author in the UFO
field, said he had not heard of a Canton link to Roswell. Friedman
co-authored a book on the topic, “Crash at Corona: The Definitive Study
of the Roswell Incident.”

Friedman, however, said he’s well aware of Timken.

“They’re a major company, and they had major responsibilities during
the war,” he said.

“Timken probably would have had a reputation for developing very strong
materials at very high temperatures,” said Friedman, 76, a nuclear
physicist.

After exhaustive research, including interviews and an examination of
countless government records, Friedman said he firmly believes that a
UFO crashed near Roswell in 1947.

Donald R. Schmitt has been researching Roswell-related events the last
21 years. He has co-authored multiple books on the subject, including,
“Witness to Roswell: Unmasking the Government’s Biggest Cover-up.”

“This is the granddaddy of them all,” Schmitt said of the Roswell
story. “If we solve this, the entire mystery is solved.”

Schmitt is intrigued by Multer’s account. “This is another piece of the
puzzle,” he said. Schmitt said he’s heard “eyewitness accounts” about
material being loaded on freight cars near the former Roswell Army Air
Field.

“All aftermath, all arrows point directly to Ohio,” Schmitt said of
Roswell, referring to other alleged Ohio connections, including
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

"Why would (Multer) lie to his wife about this?,” Schmitt said. “He
didn’t profit (from) this, he didn’t gain any notoriety or any
publicity, he didn’t do any talk shows or any interviews.”

Schmitt said he’s 99 percent certain a UFO crashed in the Roswell area.

“That remaining 1 percent is the remaining 1 percent of the curiosity
until we get a piece of the holy grail,” he added. “I do accept the
challenge of the true skeptic, not the scoffer, but the skeptic who
would remind us until you come up with the piece of the actual
hardware, a piece of the ship, you won’t have 100 percent.”

“I’m fairly familiar with the story, but I’ve not heard of this truck
driver story before, so that’s odd,” Shermer wrote in an e-mail
response. “And in any case, how would he know what alien metals look
like? Compared to what? He’s a truck driver, not a materials engineer
who would be familiar with various metals. It is probable that the
entire story is made up, or at best confabulated from several different
memories.”

“If all this was so top secret,” he wrote, “why would the government
hire some no-name, non-governmental truck driver to haul the greatest
discovery in the history of civilization?”

Benson Saler, a retired anthropology professor at Brandeis University,
co-authored a book, “UFO Crash at Roswell: The Genesis of a Modern
Myth.”

The point of the book was not to declare whether a UFO crashed or not,
he said. But “we of course don’t think it crashed because we don’t know
of any empirical evidence to support the idea that it crashed,” Saler
said.

“What we were doing,” he said, “was tracing the development of an
American myth that was unfolding right before our eyes.”

Malvern, Pennsylvania -- "This is a mass grave," Bill Watson said as he
led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30
miles from Philadelphia.

"Duffy's Cut," as it's now called, is a short walk from a suburban
cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town off the fabled Main Line. Twin
brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent
deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832.

They suspect foul play.

"This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming
to the light of day," Frank Watson said.

The brothers first heard about Duffy's Cut from their grandfather, a
railroad worker, who told the ghost story to his family every
Thanksgiving. According to local legend, memorialized in a file kept by
the Pennsylvania Railroad, a man walking home from a tavern reported
seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the mist on a warm September
night in 1909.

"I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the
cholera a month ago, a-dancing around the big trench where they were
buried; it's true, mister, it was awful," the documents quote the
unnamed man as saying. "Why, they looked as if they were a kind of
green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their
graves... I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they
were buried without the benefit of clergy."

When Frank inherited the file of his grandfather's old railroad papers,
the brothers began to believe the ghost stories were real. They
suspected that the files contained clues to the location of a mass
grave.

"One of the pieces of correspondence in this file told us 'X marks the
spot,'" said Frank. He added that the document suggested that the men
"were buried where they were making the fill, which is the original
railroad bridge."

In 2002, the brothers began digging and searching. They found forks and
remnants of a shanty and, in 2005, what Bill Watson calls the "Holy
Grail" -- a pipe with an Irish flag on it.

They knew they were close, but Bill said they knew they needed "hard
science" to get them to the next step.

The science came from Tim Bechtel, a geophysicist, who learned about
the project from a colleague at the University of Pennsylvania who had
heard the Watson brothers speak. The friend knew Bechtel could provide
the missing link in the brothers' excavation efforts.

Bechtel's work included earth scans, which can help detect what's
underground without digging or drilling.

By shooting electrical current through the slope, Bechtel said he
learned there were "oddball areas" or places where the current wouldn't
pass through. "We saw areas in the slope that were very electrically
resistant," Bechtel recalled.

This was an initial indicator something might lie beneath the surface.
After further digging, Bechtel and the Watsons detected "air bubbles
above the coffins," he said.

Bechtel helped pinpoint key areas to dig and on March 20, 2009, Bill
Watson said the team made a startling discovery.

"One of my students came running over at about 2 in the afternoon with
something that was a clearly discernable human bone," Bechtel said.

It was just the beginning of the many puzzle pieces to surface at
Duffy's Cut. The pieces led them to suspect that something other than
cholera was responsible for the deaths.

"A teeny weenie little fragment like that is so chock full of
information," said Janet Monge, holding up a jawbone and teeth found at
the Duffy's Cut site. She believes the teeth, because of their
irregularities, could someday be linked through DNA to living
descendents of the men unearthed at the dig site.

Monge, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, joined the
forensics team when Bechtel looked her up in the campus directory and
asked for help separating the human bones from any animal bones.

Since then, Monge has collected bones from seven skeletons unearthed at
Duffy's Cut, including four skulls. The trays and containers of bones
occupy a long, wide table in the back of a lecture room at the
University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia.

Poring over the bones with her green spectacles sitting low on her
nose, Monge said she has focused her attention on the skulls, adding
that they have provided crucial clues to what might have killed the
Irishmen at Duffy's Cut.

"This skull has a little divot on what would have been the side bone of
the skull," she said, holding it up. "That little divot is something
that didn't happen when they excavated it out of the ground."

With just one divot on one skull, she was reluctant to jump to
conclusions. But as more skulls surfaced, a pattern started to form.
Holding the second skull, Monge said with confidence: "This person was
clunked on the head at around the time of death."

Two weeks ago, a new piece of evidence came up from the ground at
Duffy's Cut: A skull with a perforation that could be a bullet hole.
"In fact, we can see some nice cracked edges that do look very much
like a bullet hole," Monge observed.

Monge and the team will soon test the skull for the presence of lead.
The source could be a bullet or an ax. Either way, she said, "If they
had cholera, it didn't kill them. I would say something else killed
them, but they might have had cholera, too."

Why is the mystery so important to the team?

"It could have been us," Bill Watson said. "These guys came over here
with nothing, looking for the American dream like countless people have
done. They thought they were going to make it and within six weeks of
arrival they're literally buried in the fill here."

Although they have unearthed seven individual's remains, the Duffy's
Cut team labors on to find the 50 more they believe are still
underneath the surface.

The brothers said their goal is to preserve the memory of the Irish
workers and to put the story in textbooks, to be remembered for years
to come.

"It's a story that transcends nations, transcends history in a sense.
It's the story you hear of workers that were exploited anywhere in the
world," Frank Watson said.

"How do we treat our employees? How do we treat people who immigrate
for a new life? Every human being deserves to be remembered."

North Berwick, Scotland: When Uri Geller saw a rocky lump off
Scotland's eastern coast was for sale a couple of years ago, the famed
spoon-bender says he knew he had to have it.

"I didn't know why. I was somehow drawn to it," Mr. Geller recalls. He
put in a successful £30,000, or about $46,000, offer.

Today, the 63-year-old paranormalist says he now understands why he
bought the uninhabited, 100 yard-by-50 yard Lamb Island. Buried inside,
he says, is an Egyptian treasure including relics supposedly brought
there by a pharaoh's daughter some 3,500 years ago.

Mr. Geller was once one of the most famous people in the world in the
1970s, regularly appearing on television and baffling audiences with
his spoon-bending exploits. He continues to draw a crowd, and his
sudden interest in "The Lamb," as it's known locally, is raising
eyebrows among skeptical Scots.

Tales of Scotland's ties to ancient Egypt date back to the 15th
century, but many regard them as a bit of nonsense. According to the
legend, King Tutankhamen's half-sister, Princess Scota, fell out with
her family and fled to Ireland and then Scotland, thereby giving the
country its name. Some say the alignment of the Lamb and two nearby
islands closely mirrors the layout of the pyramids at Giza, near Cairo,
not to mention the three main stars in the Orion's Belt constellation.

"Tosh!" says Edinburgh-based historian and author Stuart McHardy. Mr.
McHardy and other historians reckon the Egyptian connection evolved to
provide Scotland with a fresh identity while English invaders were
claiming the whole British Isles were named after Brutus, a Roman
consul supposedly descended from the Trojan hero Aeneas.

"That, of course, meant we had to have an equally 'ancient' story," Mr.
McHardy says.

Many locals in the nearby town of North Berwick are baffled by the
island's new-found historical provenance. Previously, the salt-sprayed
area was best known for witch trials in the 1590s and its sandy
beaches, which Robert Louis Stevenson is said to have recreated in his
novel "Treasure Island."

The Egyptian treasure "isn't even an old fisherman's tale," says Graham
Kinniburgh, manager of a wine and whisky store on the town's main
street. He sells malt whiskies named after three other local islands,
but not Mr. Geller's Lamb.

"Before Uri came along I don't think anybody had ever heard of all this
Egyptian stuff," says 55-year-old Drew McAdam, who grew up in North
Berwick idolizing Mr. Geller. Inspired by Mr. Geller's 1973 performance
on the British Broadcasting Corp., Mr. McAdam himself now travels
Britain and Europe bending spoons and performing other feats.

Mr. Geller got interested in the Lamb in 2008, when he saw on the
Internet that it was for sale, and the idea of owning an island
appealed to him. Not even the island's status as a protected seabird
colony ruffles his feathers: Mr. Geller is a vegetarian.

Buying property in Scotland, however, wasn't all plain sailing. Some
Scots best know the Israeli-born Mr. Geller, who lives in England, for
claiming to determine the outcome of a Scotland versus England soccer
match in 1996 by using his telekinetic powers to nudge the ball just as
Scotland's captain was about to strike a penalty kick. Scotland lost
the game. "I received around 11,000 hate mails for that," Mr. Geller
says.

Now that Mr. Geller is the best-known landowner in this corner of
Scotland, 26 miles east of the capital, Edinburgh, he is eager to
improve his reputation.

On his first trip to North Berwick in March, Mr. Geller ran up a local
landmark, a 613-foot-tall hill called "The Law," in a bid to endear
himself to locals.

He then lunched on a baked potato with ketchup at the Scottish Seabird
Center. He impressed staff by apparently using his mental powers to
bend some teaspoons, several of which are still in drawers in the
center's kitchen.

In the evening, he gave another performance, at one point producing
mustard seeds that suddenly sprouted when he handed them to a member of
the audience. "He had everybody eating out of his hand," says Lynda
Dalgliesh, who works at the center.

"He made a big impression on everybody, even my mother," says Mr.
McAdam, who Mr. Geller invited to perform.

The next day, Mr. Geller chugged the ten minutes to the island on a
fishing boat to spend a night on the Lamb, among tens of thousands of
seabirds and an English adventurer. "It was excruciatingly cold, with
not a single flat spot to lay a sleeping bag," Mr. Geller says.

Some local businesses are beginning to wake up to the island's allure
since Mr. Geller turned up. Some boat operators, for instance, take
tourists around the Lamb and recount folklore surrounding the island.

For his next trick, Mr. Geller hopes to really astonish the locals by
locating the ancient trinkets he thinks are buried within the volcanic
rock of the Lamb.

Using dowsing—a technique Mr. Geller says he previously used to detect
oil deposits in the Gulf of Mexico—he reckons he has pin-pointed a
place on his island where treasure might be buried.

He hopes to excavate if he can secure permission from the Scottish
authorities—and only if it doesn't offend the Lamb's legions of gulls,
cormorants and shags.

Rob Sinclair at the local council's planning department says Mr. Geller
doesn't need legal approval to dig on his land. "But he might like to
talk to our Council archaeologist about whether it would be worth his
time and energy," Mr. Sinclair says.

"I'm certain there are ancient Egyptian artifacts there," Mr. Geller
says. "It's only a matter of time until we find them."

And if there wasn't any treasure on the Lamb before, there is now. Mr.
Geller says he has strengthened the island's mystical powers by burying
a crystal orb that once belonged to Albert Einstein.